Weave... Mozilla Is Trying To Be More Social

Cassanova writes "Weave is the newest Mozilla Labs project. It allows the user to save browser settings on Mozilla servers (Favorites, sessions, passwords, etc.) and load them from anywhere. With this project, Mozilla is trying to be an online services provider, which is an important step. But can Mozilla labs get over the privacy issues?"

Useful enough?

[headkase]

I think it depends on personal preference. If it was opt-in and encrypted on your end before it was stored on Mozilla servers then they send you the (encrypted) data on local load of Firefox then you enter your secret password/phrase (or have it come out of the wallet or equivalent) to decrypt it, again, locally then there wouldn't be *any* privacy issues. And if you chose to use it it would definately come in handy for those instances where the OS unexpectedly borks itself on you and you have to reinstall. Then install firefox, enter your access code and at least that part it back to pre-bork settings.

Re:so use encryption.

[Negatyfus]

Actually, that's what they do now. From the article:

• We currently encrypt on the client all data that gets placed on the server, with an encryption passphrase that only the user knows.
• We kept the server intentionally dumb and standards-based, so that anyone can set up a server for themselves and/or their friends or company.

If you haven't looked at Firefox 3...

[FooAtWFU]

If you haven't looked at Firefox 3 beta, there are some crazy new bookmark features, including "smart" bookmarks generated from frequently-visited sites and such. There's also bookmark tagging. This must fit in very nicely with the "weave" strategy.

I'd be worried if I were del.icio.us. Not panicked, just worried. :)

Re:I dislike

[ParaShoot]

Why? What would you rather see - "she" written throughout the article? How would that be any better? "It"? "He/she" or "s/he" everywhere? Cumbersome and ugly. "They"? Grammatically incorrect, despite being used everywhere. "One" just sounds weird and formal (and the article isn't written in German).

An arbitrary choice was made. Pick "he" sometimes and "she" at other times, if it bothers you that much. More importantly, stop making big issues out of nonexistent ones - you understood the article, didn't you? Language is about communication; people being arsey about things like this are missing the point entirely.

/rant

host it yourself?

[evilmoo]

From the debugging logs, it seems like the information is just stored on a server via HTTPS+WebDAV. So if you control a web site (and you trust it more than you trust Mozilla), just change the Server Location (in Advanced Settings) from "https://services.mozilla.com/" to your own server. You will have to create a directory underneath that is the sha1sum of your account name, and it is up to you to set the permissions on the directory properly so that no one else can access it. Of course, this is all just an educated guess, but... "The rest is left as an exercise to the reader." :)

Google Browser Sync

[eht]

Google Browser Sync [google.com]

And it's about as secure as your Google account already is. Whatever that means.

Re:Id like to see

[One Childish N00b]

I hate to want to reply to own post, but just in case you think TFA is just some goof with a Blogspot blog, the original quote is from Mozilla Labs [mozilla.com], specifically from Dan Mills [sandmill.org], a FireFox dev and former Novell engineer - definately not the average moron [sandmill.org].

Opera?

[JLennox]

I'm suprised at the lack of mention that Opera has had this feature since September.

Link

[jpkunst]

Link to the actual Mozilla Labs project page instead of to some blog: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/ [mozilla.com]

Re:so use encryption.

[xenocide2]

It wouldn't matter. At some point, email is transmitted in the clear. Either you trust Google or you don't. If you don't trust Google, they're receiving all your mail in the clear, so they're already capable of violating your "privacy". If you do trust them and still want your data encrypted, you're not getting much benefit -- the data still goes to recipients in the clear, and they can still receive copies.

You're probably better off with thunderbird or evolution or something and gmail IMAP, where you can store private keys safely for decryption without Google having access.

Re:They need to focus on maintenence, too.

[bunratty]

They have been spending lots of time fixing those issues. Are there any specific bug reports you think should be addressed? Any particular site or feature you're having a problem with?

If you cannot or will not track down the problems you're complaining about, and they persist even after creating a new profile and trying other fixes in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base [mozillazine.org] and asking for help in the MozillaZine Forums [mozillazine.org], you should simply switch to another browser. Why put up with serious problems when there are so many other browsers to choose from?

Re:Useful enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article

We currently encrypt on the client all data that gets placed on the server, with an encryption passphrase that only the user knows.

So yes it is encrypted on your end before it was stored on Mozilla servers.

Re:They need to focus on maintenence, too.

[bunratty]

No, creating a new profile does not cause you to lose any information. You can import your old settings to the new profile [mozillazine.org].

The advice to create a new profile also has nothing to do with memory leaks in Mozilla software. If you're experiencing bugs in Mozilla software, you'll still see them with a new profile. If creating a new profile fixes a problem, it was due to a bad extension or other bad setting. In some rare situations, it may be possible that a perfectly reasonable setting triggers a bug in Firefox. If you see that is the case, simply point out the problem by posting to the MozillaZine forums or filing a bug report in Bugzilla, then the problem can be fixed.

If you still experience problems after creating a new profile and following the other basic advice in the Knowledge Base, and posting about the problem in the MozillaZine forums also doesn't help, then yes, a user should consider changing to another browser.